2017 PERC Poster: Impact of experience and equipment on student responses to open-ended dorm room experiments

Poster presented at the 2017 Physics Education Research Conference (PERC) describing the effects of lesson design on the choices students make while doing at-home physics experiments.

Poster abstract: At the University of Illinois, we have been engaged in lab reform at the introductory level which includes prelab assignments where students do simple physics experiments in their dorm rooms using the Interactive Online Laboratory (IOLab) system. In several of these assignments, students answer open-ended questions where they are given the freedom to choose what is important or interesting about their experimental data. We expect that as students grow accustomed to the prelab format and become more familiar with the IOLab equipment the quality and depth of their answers to these questions would improve. In two studies, we have investigated the impact of semester experience and equipment training on how students respond to open-ended prelab prompts for simple physical scenarios. This poster will describe these studies and their outcomes from comparing student responses from early and late in the semester and with varied equipment training conditions.